Record 93,770,000 Americans Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Matches 38-Year Low

A record 93,770,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month, and the labor force participation rate remained at 62.6 percent, exactly where it was in June -- a 38-year low, the Labor Department reported on Friday. --In 1975, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping such records, 58,627,000 Americans were not in the labor force, and the number has grown steadily since then, breaking the 80-million mark at the end of George W. Bush's presidency; and the 90-million mark in July 2013, during Barack Obama's second term. The number of Americans not in the labor force has continued to rise since then.

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56,023,000: Record Number of Women Not in Labor Force

A record 56,023,000 women, age 16 years and over, were not in the labor force in February.  Not only was that a record high, but it’s also the first time the number has exceeded 56 million, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  To be counted as “not in the labor force,” according to the BLS, one must not have a job or have looked for one in the past four weeks. In January 2015, there were 55,756,000 women not in the labor force, which means that 267,000 women dropped out of the labor force since then.

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Hard Questions About Oregon’s Employment Picture

Last week the Oregonian published an article on the declining labor force participation rate in Oregon. Well it wasn’t actually an article – it was a rewrite of the Oregon Department of Employment’s press release right down to the pretext of the decline that holds Gov. John Kitzhaber and three decades of Democrat administrations blameless. Not a single critical question was asked by the Oregonian. Not a single moment was spent on any independent research. It’s what happens when a decidedly liberal press corps evolves from watchdog to lapdog.

I suppose one can be encouraged that Mr. Kitzhaber and the Oregonian have stooped to even acknowledging the labor participation rate in contrast to the much ballyhooed and specious unemployment rate.

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Beyond Rosy Jobs Forecasts

It’s one thing when a right-wing think tank scores the economy under a Democratic president. It’s quite another when a left-wing think tank gives it a failing grade.  “The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, nearly five years ago,” Heidi Shierholz, Alyssa Davis and Will Kimball write in The Class of 2014: The Weak Economy Is Idling Too Many Young Graduates, a report released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute. “However, the labor market has made agonizingly slow progress toward a full recovery, and the slack that remains continues to be devastating for workers of all ages.”

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